Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell by Javier Marías, Margaret Jull Costa Page A
Authors: Javier Marías, Margaret Jull Costa
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happened.
Perhaps that's why Pérez Nuix asked me for the favor early on, when it still hadn't even occurred to me that by the end of the night we would get so close and even reach the morning without entirely letting go of each other. Well, actually the idea had crossed my mind, not as a possible possibility but as a hypothetical improbability (a strange idea in the back of the mind, acknowledging to yourself that you would accept something that is clearly never going to happen), and the first time had been while she was repeatedly zipping and unzipping her boots and drying herself on my towel and there was a snag in one of her stockings that degenerated into a long, wide run, and she had blithely revealed her thighs to me and thus indicated that she did not exclude me. 'She doesn't rule me out, but that's as far as it goes,' I had thought. 'Nothing more, that's all, I am the one who notices and bears it in mind. In reality, though, it's nothing.' And: 'There's a great gulf between feeling desire and not entirely rejecting someone, between affirmation and the unknown, between willingness and the simple absence of any plan, between a "Yes" and a "Possibly," between a "Fine" and a "We'll see" or even less than that, an "Anyway" or an "Hmm, right" or something which doesn't even formulate itself as a thought, a limbo, a space, a void, it's not something I've ever considered, it hadn't even occurred to me, it hadn't even crossed my mind.' I was still invisible to her when she asked me the favor, and perhaps I remained so throughout the night and even into the morning. Except perhaps for that brief moment when she cupped my face with her open hands as if professing some affection for me, the two of us, by then, lying in my bed ready to go to sleep, her soft hands; when she looked into my eyes and smiled at me and laughed and delicately held my face just as Luisa sometimes used to do when her bed was still mine and we were not yet sleepy, or not enough to say goodnight and turn our backs on each other until the morning.
But that came later. And as almost always happens when you ask a string of questions one after the other, young Pérez Nuix began by answering the last one. 'You still haven't asked me the favor, what is it exactly, I still don't know. And which private private individuals do you mean?' had been my two questions, repeating the expression she had used 'private private individuals.'
'Strange though it may seem to us today, Jaime, with our nerves constantly on edge and with everyone in a permanent state of panic over terrorism,' she said, 'there was a period of a few years, quite recently in fact, although it seems a long time ago to us now, when MI5 and MI6, shall we say, lacked work. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, their duties diminished as did their concerns, and the budgets they had at their disposal collapsed, which, as we now know, was a great mistake. For example, the budget for MI5 went from £900 million in 1994 to less than £700 million in 1998. Then it gradually started creeping up again, but until the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, which set all the alarm bells ringing and provoked much breast-beating and many dismissals from the ranks of middle management, there were about seven or eight years when a large part of the world's Intelligence Service, and, of course, our own, felt almost useless and superfluous, how can I put it, unoccupied, unnecessary, idle and, worse, bored. Many of the people who had spent decades studying the Soviet Union found themselves not unemployed exactly, but surplus to requirements, with a sense that they had not only wasted their time, but also a large portion of their lives, which were abruptly coming to an end. A sense that they had become the past. Those who knew German, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish and Czech were called on less frequently, and even Russian experts lost prominence and work. Suddenly, there was a kind of unacknowledged superfluity, suddenly, people
Perhaps that's why Pérez Nuix asked me for the favor early on, when it still hadn't even occurred to me that by the end of the night we would get so close and even reach the morning without entirely letting go of each other. Well, actually the idea had crossed my mind, not as a possible possibility but as a hypothetical improbability (a strange idea in the back of the mind, acknowledging to yourself that you would accept something that is clearly never going to happen), and the first time had been while she was repeatedly zipping and unzipping her boots and drying herself on my towel and there was a snag in one of her stockings that degenerated into a long, wide run, and she had blithely revealed her thighs to me and thus indicated that she did not exclude me. 'She doesn't rule me out, but that's as far as it goes,' I had thought. 'Nothing more, that's all, I am the one who notices and bears it in mind. In reality, though, it's nothing.' And: 'There's a great gulf between feeling desire and not entirely rejecting someone, between affirmation and the unknown, between willingness and the simple absence of any plan, between a "Yes" and a "Possibly," between a "Fine" and a "We'll see" or even less than that, an "Anyway" or an "Hmm, right" or something which doesn't even formulate itself as a thought, a limbo, a space, a void, it's not something I've ever considered, it hadn't even occurred to me, it hadn't even crossed my mind.' I was still invisible to her when she asked me the favor, and perhaps I remained so throughout the night and even into the morning. Except perhaps for that brief moment when she cupped my face with her open hands as if professing some affection for me, the two of us, by then, lying in my bed ready to go to sleep, her soft hands; when she looked into my eyes and smiled at me and laughed and delicately held my face just as Luisa sometimes used to do when her bed was still mine and we were not yet sleepy, or not enough to say goodnight and turn our backs on each other until the morning.
But that came later. And as almost always happens when you ask a string of questions one after the other, young Pérez Nuix began by answering the last one. 'You still haven't asked me the favor, what is it exactly, I still don't know. And which private private individuals do you mean?' had been my two questions, repeating the expression she had used 'private private individuals.'
'Strange though it may seem to us today, Jaime, with our nerves constantly on edge and with everyone in a permanent state of panic over terrorism,' she said, 'there was a period of a few years, quite recently in fact, although it seems a long time ago to us now, when MI5 and MI6, shall we say, lacked work. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, their duties diminished as did their concerns, and the budgets they had at their disposal collapsed, which, as we now know, was a great mistake. For example, the budget for MI5 went from £900 million in 1994 to less than £700 million in 1998. Then it gradually started creeping up again, but until the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, which set all the alarm bells ringing and provoked much breast-beating and many dismissals from the ranks of middle management, there were about seven or eight years when a large part of the world's Intelligence Service, and, of course, our own, felt almost useless and superfluous, how can I put it, unoccupied, unnecessary, idle and, worse, bored. Many of the people who had spent decades studying the Soviet Union found themselves not unemployed exactly, but surplus to requirements, with a sense that they had not only wasted their time, but also a large portion of their lives, which were abruptly coming to an end. A sense that they had become the past. Those who knew German, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish and Czech were called on less frequently, and even Russian experts lost prominence and work. Suddenly, there was a kind of unacknowledged superfluity, suddenly, people
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